Article excerpt

"SASHA AND EMMA: THE ANARCHIST ODYSSEY OF ALEXANDER BERKMAN AND
EMMA GOLDMAN"

By Paul Avrich & Karen Avrich.

Belknap/Harvard University Press ($35).

Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman were determined to create a
government-free paradise on Earth. As their biographers, Paul and
Karen Avrich, demonstrate, they didn't much care how many people
they had to kill to achieve their dream.

Fortunately for every country where they temporarily set down
roots, neither had the planning skills or, more importantly, the
basic mechanical ability to carry out their utopian dreams.

Berkman in 1892 originally had thought to use dynamite to kill
Henry Clay Frick, the head of Carnegie Steel. He spent several days
building two bombs. When the first one failed to go off during a
test, he decided to switch to a handgun. "A week's preparation had
been lost and forty dollars wasted," the Avriches write.

Paul Avrich, a scholar of Russian and anarchist history, had
worked for many years on a book about the personal and political
relationship between Berkman and Goldman. After his death in 2006,
his daughter, Karen, augmented her father's draft, notes and
interviews with her own research to produce "Sasha and Emma: The
Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman." The
resulting book provides an in-depth look at a lesser-known chapter
of American and world history: the decades-long war that anarchists
waged on governments around the world.

While their weapons more often consisted of speeches, pamphlets
and rallies, they augmented those tools with bombs, bullets and
blades. Their unlikely victims included the liberal Russian Czar
Alexander II, reformist French President Marie-Francois Sadi Carnot,
the inoffensive Empress Elisabeth of Austria and U.S. President
William McKinley.

Anarchists also sought to blow up the mansion at Pocantico Hills,
outside New York City, owned by oil baron John D. Rockefeller. The
Avriches find plenty of evidence that Berkman helped with the
planning, but the conspirators wisely kept him away from the actual
bomb making. That didn't help. Three of the plotters accidentally
blew themselves up in a Manhattan apartment building on July 3,
1914. The massive explosion injured 20 people and killed a fourth
woman unconnected to the dead anarchists' plot.

Berkman, who dodged both the explosion and arrest afterward,
praised the dead men at a memorial service. "I want to go on record
as saying that I hope our comrades were manufacturing the bomb that
caused their death and that they hoped to use it against our
enemies," he told mourners.

* * *

Berkman is best known in Western Pennsylvania as the man who shot
and stabbed Henry Clay Frick at his office in Downtown Pittsburgh
during the Homestead Steel Strike. …

Empathy for the Anarchists like Good Biographers, the Avriches Have Some Sympathy for Sasha Berkman and EmmaGoldman. (HenryClayFrick Did Not.)Barcousky, Len.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Pittsburgh, PA), January 20, 2013